🔗 Share this article

Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's control. A key character, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world

In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress independence of reason, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The story begins with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to open into other worlds. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is set.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the